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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Sight & Sound released the results of their latest poll which is taken every ten years to determine the "greatest" films as chosen by critics and directors. The critic's poll was decided by 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors. The directors' poll was taken from the responses of 358 directors.

Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane is no longer the reigning champion. Although it was not among the top ten of the first critics' list in 1952, it assumed the number one spot in 1962 and then remained there for the next five lists up to 2002. It was chosen number one on the first directors' list in 1992 and was also number one for the directors' 2002 list.

But it has now been replaced on both lists. For the director's list, the number one film is now Ozu's Tokyo Story while on the critics' list the top film is now Hitchcock's Vertigo. Citizen Kane is number two on the critics' list and tied for second with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on the directors' list.
Completing the director's top ten are Fellini's 8 ½, Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Coppola's Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, Vertigo, Tarkovsky's Mirror and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves. The critics' top ten continue with Tokyo Story, La Règle du jeu, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Searchers, Man with a Movie Camera, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 8½. Both are excellent lists.

The films that made the top ten for both lists are Tokyo Story, Vertigo. Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey and 8½.

The only films on the lists made in the new millenium are Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (though technically still the last millenium) and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.

Like Roger Ebert, I'm not a fan of lists of any sort. I think they are subjective and arbitrary, and it's a fool's game to compare great works of art. When it comes to masterpieces, most people can agree that certain works stand at the top of their categories. But can one really say that this or that painting by Rembrandt is better than another by a completely different painter such as da Vinci, Van Gogh, or Picasso? Can one prove that one great poem by Milton is definitely greater than a great poem by Goethe or Dante? Is there such a thing as a "greatest" film that is indisputably better than all others?

No.

So it makes no sense to me that one can really think that one film can be better than another just because it is higher on one or both lists. All one can say is that this year, more people polled preferred this film over that film.

Nonetheless, the list is a useful place to start one's film education. There are no dogs on either list (though I think Psycho is over-rated and not one of Hitchcock's best) and all are well-respected films that deserve to be seen if one hasn't already. As they were created by polling a number of respondents, they aren't as purely subjective as most personal lists and they aren't as disposable and uninformed as lists from public websites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.